Improving our Lot

Let me try to summarise what I have been trying to say in the various posts I’ve written this year about subjects such as good governance, anti-corruption and helping people help themselves…..

-       “Good governance” is an important concept

-       which has suffered from its patronising origins viz wanting to tell others what to do

-       and from the domination of the anti-corruption field by economists and political scientists

-       Most anti-corruption strategies are not worth the paper they are written on. Most AC Boards are sinecures used to hide real misdeeds 

-       Every country needs to take more seriously the question of how government can work better for its citizens

-       It is the sort of subject which could be tackled by a Citizen’s Jury – but only after municipalities have satisfactorily demonstrated the potential of that device.

-       Until that happens, social scientists and others should be cooperating in each country to summarise the various reports on improving the style and machinery of government already produced and to formulate practical propositions which could be used in such initiatives

-       On the basis, however, that only a consensual approach can help break down the high level of distrust which exists everywhere about government. Unilateral, top-down injunctions don’t work…

-       Accountability, effective public bodies, rule of law and transparency are not exactly the sort of words and phrases calculated to inspire people

-       The approach to change needs to be “sexier” 

And I’m not sure if “Happiness” is the silver bullet. I’ve just finished reading a little Pelican book “Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics” by Richard Layard (2020) who was New Labour’s Happiness Tsar (clicking the title will give you a good summary by the author). I enjoyed the book – although others were deeply sceptical.

It is NOT one of these self-help books but very much directed at the sort of policy-makers who were persuaded in the early part of the millennium that the measurement of social progress needed to go beyond reliance on growth rates. Joseph Stiglitz has been one of the key figures in this development. Various countries – including Bhutan, New Zealand and Scotland have been sufficiently persuaded to set up special programmes…although “wellbeing” is often the word used rather than “happiness”

One of the interesting features of Layard’s book is that half of it consists of a consideration of how its basic message might be applied by a range of people – including health professionals, teachers, communities, scientists, economists, politicians and public servants. I was sad to see that the section on politicians and public managers contains none of the references I might have expected to see on the good government literature eg Bo Rothstein or Merilee Grindle particularly when the final chapter of Rothstein’s Good Government – the relevance of political science (2012) strongly argues that better government makes people happier

Good Governance Revisited

“Good governance” may have been in the subtitle of my 1999 “In Transit” book - but it’s a concept of which I’ve been not only sharply critical but downright dismissive.

The idea of a government which works for its people is an important one – so why have I not shown more enthusiasm for it? Surely we all support such things as transparency, rule of law, accountability and effective public bodies – the notions that lie at the heart of “good governance”?? 

My problem initially was that, in the 1990s, these were largely Western ideas (some very recent) which we were imposing on non-Western nations and expecting them to imitate. Furthermore, we ourselves subsequently proved incapable of living up to these high standards – as an important post earlier this year set out.

Indeed the expectations were so utopian that a Harvard Professor proposed instead (in 2002) the principle of Good Enough Governance – which emphasised that staging and prioritising were needed in a process which would take some considerable time. Remember that, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Ralf Dahrendorf had warned that it would take at least a generation for the Rule of Law to become properly embedded and enforced in ex-communist societies.

Thirty years later that’s looking a shade optimistic!

And Merlilee Grindle followed up a few years later with Good Governance Revisited (2005) which is ALMOST the definitive paper for this discussion – particularly with its tables and diagram detailing the variety of issues and stages at stake….  

My reservation stems from the fact that Grindle’s paper focuses on what we used to call the “developing” nations and fails to recognise that the Eastern bloc of new EU member states still don’t have fully legitimised systems of governance – she is, after all, more of a specialist in Latin American systems. Her five-fold typology of government – “collapsed”, “personal rule”, “minimally institutionalised”, “institutionalised, non-competitive states” and “institutionalised, competitive states” – seems a bit crude to me and to need nuancing.

Countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania need a category of their own.

For the moment, I offer some generalised comments on the difficulties all countries face in seeking to achieve better government. This, of course, begs the question of how many countries are genuinely seeking to improve their systems

Why progress toward Better Government is difficult

Key Principles	Key Factor	Other explanations
Transparency	Ivan Krastev argues that the new emphasis on transparency has increased public distrust	Mainstream media is no longer trusted
Accountability	Globalisation has meant surrender of national powers - and shown political elites to be out of touch
Rule of Law	Various legal scandals have demonstrated judicial incompetence-  and that justice commands a price. In countries like the USA even the basic issue of political succession is now open to doubt – with Republican voters and reps denying the validity of Biden’s election and Republicans denying black voters their right to vote	judges have been socialised into the elite and find it difficult to challenge their own – and in ex-communist countries belong to networks
Effective pubic institutions	Austerity programmes have weakened the efficacy of state bodies	The traditional notion of civil service independence now questioned

You get the sense that Western authorities are now embarrassed by the naivety they showed in the 1990s for believing that change (in others) was possible; that they have decided to follow Grindle’s advice quite literally ("good enough") at least as far as it is applied to themselves.

The best writing on the subject

-       Cultural explanations of economic failure 2019 A useful critique of our (over)readiness to use the cultural explanation

-       Fighting Systemic Corruption – the indirect strategy Bo Rothstein 2018 a typically thoughtful approach from one of the key (Swedish) analysts of government systems

-       Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions

-       Making development work Bo Rothstein 2015 An important report

-       The Cultural Foundations of Economic Failure: A Conceptual Toolkit; Paul Collier (2015) Collier is a development economist who wrote an excellent recent book about capitalism and several important studies on migration.

-       Bringing politics back in; Brian Levy (2013) Brian Levy is another economist – who wrote “Against the Grain”

-       What is Governance? Francis Fukuyama (2013) Fukuyama is a key writer in this field

-       Jobs for the Boys Merilee Grindle (2012) A book in which Grindle analyses the situation in 4 Latin American countries

-       Good Government – the relevance of political science; ed S Holmberg and B Rothstein (2012) A very useful collection of the evidence about how much the quality of government matters – including a final chapter which strongly argues that better government makes people happier.

-       Good Governance - Inflation of an Idea Merilee Grindle 2010 

Helping People Help Themselves

“Development” is a strange word. It’s been prefixed to so many other words – community, economic, rural, regional, social, urban – that we tend to overlook it. It generally has a positive connotation – although only when used within the boundaries of a particular country. Something seems to go seriously wrong when “development” is something encouraged by outsiders.

That, at any rate, is the general view now taken by “development theorists” – the people who write about and advise what used to be called “developing” countries. In the 1970s and 1980s these were predominantly economists but “good governance” specialists became active in the 1990s.

The development field has become a highly contested one – with writers from the political extremes sharing a highly critical approach to the conventional wisdom coming from centrist liberals. The right-wing (Bauer, Easterley) consider that Foreign Aid just builds up “dependence” whilst the left-wing accuse the centrist liberals of aiding and abetting imperialism. These are the essential currents at the heart of the current British debate about the cuts to the UK Foreign Aid budget.

Foreign Aid seems to be a very distinctive topic – almost sui generis. But scratch the other “development” types – social, rural, regional, urban, educational – and we find the same pattern of someone in authority trying to get others to behave in certain ways. Economists tend to be the dominant voices but the occasional sociologist, agronomist, pedagogue even anthropologist pops up.

But truly interdisciplinary works are very difficult to find – until now the most profound writer on the subject for me was Robert Chambers whose field is rural development. But I have just come across an article Helping People help themselves – toward a theory of autonomy, written 20 years ago by an adviser to ex-World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, which seems to me to get to the heart of the development conundrum. And the article led to a book Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance ; David Ellerman (2006) 

If development is seen basically as autonomous self-development, then there is a subtle paradox or conundrum in the whole notion of development assistance: how can an outside party ("helper") assist those who are undertaking autonomous activities (the "doers") without overriding or undercutting their autonomy?

How can a development agency actually help people help themselves as opposed to giving various forms of unhelpful help? The topic is related to the presumption in favour of inclusion, popular participation, involvement, and ownership as well as the suspicion that externally applied "carrots and sticks" do not "buy" sustainable policy changes.

We cast a wide and vigorously multidisciplinary net to construct the intellectual background. Helping theory is approached by looking at the commonalties in quite different examples of relationships where one party, the "helper," is trying to help certain others, here called the "doers," to better help themselves. The target example of the helper-doer relationship is the relationship between a development agency and a client country but the theme is also explored in pedagogy, management theory, psychotherapy, community organization, and community education. The helper-doer relationships and prominent authors or "gurus" are (see Appendix for representative quotes):

* Albert Hirschman on the relationship of a development advisor and a government,

* E.F. Schumacher on the relationship between a development agency and a developing country,

* Saul Alinsky on the relation of a community organizer to the community,

* Paulo Freire on the relationship between an educator and a peasant (or urban poor) community,

* Soren Kierkegaard on the relation between a spiritual counselor and a student,

* John Dewey on the teacher-learner relationship,

* Carl Rogers on the therapist-client relationship, and 

* Douglas McGregor on the (Theory Y) relationship between a manager and workers. 

The argument is not that all these relationships are the same, but that there are commonalties when the party in the "helper" role acts so as to help the parties in the "doer" role to help themselves. The fact that such diverse thinkers in different fields arrive at interestingly similar conclusions increases our confidence in the common principles.

Some principles of a Broader Helping Theory:

·       I Starting from Where the Doers Are

·       2. Seeing Through the Doers' Eyes

·       3: Helper Cannot Impose Change on Doers

·       4: Help as Benevolence is Ineffective

·       5 Doers in the Driver's Seat Helping Theory Applied to Development Assistance

 

Ivan Illich’s neglected influence on my generation

 How did a priest manage to captivate me (and others) for the best part of a decade in the 1970s? I was, after all, a politician – if a reforming one – with increasing responsible positions as, first, a Chairman of a (newly-established) municipal social work committee and then as Secretary of the ruling group of Scotland’s (and Europe’s) largest Region and its strategist for its central policy relating to multiple deprivation – or social justice as it would be called these days. What, you might well ask, was I doing with a dangerous anarchist who challenged the claims of health and educational professionals? 

I had, admittedly, been open to community action since first encountering the likes of Saul Alinsky and Paulo Freire as I fought the local housing bureaucracy with local residents in the late 1960s – as you can see in the long 1977 article  Community Development – its political and administrative challenge.  Alinsky was more of a tactical street-fighter; Freire the deep and inspirational thinker about self-help. But it was Illich who supplied the hard weaponry

The seeds were probably sown a decade earlier – at university – when I was exposed to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and its demolition of those who claimed universal truths. The article given by the link is a critical reassessment of the 2 volume work after 50 years but can’t detract from the powerful impact it had on this reader in the early 1960s. Even at school, I had learned to be a “freethinker” and to be suspicious of what JK Galbraith called “the conventional wisdom”. 

Illich’s critique in the 1970s of the monstrous arrogance of health and educational professionals in claiming to know best was, therefore, pushing at an open door for the likes of us….In all the talk of the dominant narrative of Neoliberalism, this element in my generation’s formation tends to be forgotten.

Social Democracy was undermined to a large extent because my generation stopped believing in the big battalions – not least because of the power of such writers as Illich. In so doing, we committed the first but unnoticed unilateral disarmament! It was the Trade Unions and the working class who had given democracy its teeth. But – as individualists and members of identity tribes - we came to scorn organisational power and have allowed Big Money to subvert democracy with its lobbying, Think Tanks and Corporate Media. 

I am not, of course, doing Illich justice when I paint his contribution as one largely of criticism. There was also a deep caring and compassion for the ordinary person – and their capabilities. But, somehow, we western readers tended to take that for granted – such was the power of his dismantling of the claims of the powerful. 

Some Reading on Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich

https://www.noemamag.com/a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-come/ a short article

The Prophet of Cuernavaca – Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West by Todd Hartch (2015) is a recent testimony to the man.

The Challenges of Ivan Illich – a collective reflection; by L Hainacki (2002)

We Make the Road by Walking – conversations on education and social change; Myles Horton and Paulo Freire (1990) Myles Horton was a great American practitioner of working class education who teamed up with Freire for this book

Tools for Conviviality; is a short book by Ivan Illich (1975) which gives a sense of his style.

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Adulation and Narcissism in Leaders

It is too easy these days to fault politicians. They have become the go-to scapegoat. And we should always be suspicious when a scapegoat is offered as the explanation for society’s ills….In Germany, in the 1930s, it was the Jews; post-war America chose the “Commies”; Trump and the Brexiteers immigrants. 

The account Tom Bower gave in his book about Blair’s record in government – Broken Vows – Tony Blair, the tragedy of power (2016) which I reviewed in the last post but one was, quite bluntly, a bit of a travesty. But it did indicate some of Blair’s personal weaknesses – in particular indecisiveness, cowardice and downright fear of his Finance Minister, Gordon Brown, to whom he deferred on all budgetary matters (if not also of his spin-man Alastair Campbell).

And few of us needed reminding of Blair’s greed, superficiality and delusions (of grandeur) which became very obvious once he left power in 2007.

Blair is not the first political leader to register psychological issues – and certainly not the last. His immediate successor, Gordon Brown, was a bit of a bully (with all the implied weaknesses) but had the compensatory gifts of high intelligence and political nous. The walking disaster that is Boris Johnson has no such excuses.

Trump’s narcissism has made us all more aware of the neglect of political psychology as an explanatory factor in leadership. In the 1970s I remember a wonderful book written by a reforming Labour MP Private Member Leo Abse (1973) which applied Freudian analysis to the issue of the social liberalisation process of the Wilson Labour governments.

But we needed The Psychology of Politicians ed by Ashley Weinberg (2012) to get the full picture.

As a rather reserved strategic politician in Europe’s largest regional authority (in Scotland) I had in the late 1970s been briefly tempted to go to Parliament – with a strong chance of victory – but had decided against simply because I saw the damage it did to your psyche. I knew a few MPs quite well – and they all had this harassed look in their eyes

Amazon arrogance - they actually couldn't care less about customers

I’m delighted to report that Amazon have locked me out of my account. I used Amazon these past few years only when I’m in my summer house in the mountains – otherwise the combination of bookshops here in Bucharest and the internet Zlibrary more than satisfy my needs. Indeed I have an embarrassment of unread books – particularly virtual ones in pdf format (more than 500).

Amazon have recently started a security coding system which depends exclusively on smart phones – which I refuse to adopt. So I can no longer use my password to check in to my account. I tried this evening to alert them to this – but had first to go through a security check which I failed since I was unable to give them

-       my precise postal code; I gave them the correct address but one of numbers of the 6 digit postal code was wrong

-       3 titles of recent purchases (which were late last summer – which they could confirm - but I could remember only one title since I have looked at literally hundreds of books since then);

-       or the number of my current credit card (which is out of date and I have destroyed as the bank advised)   

They can assert they were just looking after my interests but to lock me out when 99% of the detail was correct is sheer stupidity. I was feeling guilty about continuing to use Amazon (even spasmodically) – they have done such huge damage to

-       the book trade

-       independent bookshops

-       national budgets

     pollution in the skies as they fly stuff we don't need so quickly

So I am relieved that they have been so stupid as to lock out someone who had been a good customer of theirs for more than 20 years – needing books which were simply not available in countries such as Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Romania.

The only drawback is that I will in future be unable to send books to my daughters…..

One final thought - as far as Amazon is concerned, I was an intruder trying to gain access to an account unlawfully. You would have thought that they would have subsequently sent me a warning note about this. The fact that they haven;t done so - 20 hours after the attempt - suggests to me that they have accepted that this was a genuine attempt by a customer but that they don't actually care.....

Assessing a government’s record

Is a balanced judgement on a government ever possible?

I’ve just finished a book about New Labour under Tony Blair. He was PM for 10 years – from 1997 to 2007, leaving office just before the global financial crisis broke – and this particular book, “Broken Vows – Tony Blair, the tragedy of power”, published almost a decade later, purports to be an assessment of his government’s record - at least in the fields of health, education, immigration, energy and “the wars”.

Tom Bower is a well-known British investigative journalist who has profiled commercial rogues such as Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowlands, Conrad Black, Bernie Ecclestone (of F1 fame) and Richard Desmond let alone characters such as Klaus Barbie but offers more sympathetic profiles of Prince Charles, Simon Cowell and Boris Johnson.

His bibliography lists the books he relied on – basically 40 memoirists and not a single one of the many writers whose serious analytical accounts of the period were available if only Bower had had the patience to read serious material.

It’s significant, for example, that no mention is made – whether in the bibliography or the text – of a book which had attempted an assessment both fair and accessible - The Verdict – did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee and David Walker issued several years earlier in 2010. 

And that is certainly the question by which it is reasonable to hold both Blair and New Labour to account. “Modernisation” was Blair’s mantra – conservatism the enemy whether it rested in the trade unions or the civil service – both of whom he regarded as the immediate enemy.

Indeed such was the suspicion of the civil service from the very beginning that virtually all New Labour Ministers threw their senior civil servants’ advice notes into the bin. They had their manifesto – strongly enforced by both Blair and Brown, the “Iron Chancellor”.

Not only Civil Servants but the Cabinet was treated with utter contempt – if it had not been for the Blair-Brown tension which would often break out in open conflict, the resultant system might have lapsed into total “groupthink”…..

Sadly, however, Bower doesn’t bother to use (or even make reference to) the excellent analysis available in British Government in Crisis (2005) by Christopher Foster who had been both an adviser and consultant but prefers instead to rest on a critique of the vainglorious Michael Barber of “deliverology” infamy

Strangely, only in Education had New Labour come with coherent plans for the future. Bower’s story is one of the system staggering from one crisis to another – with no lessons learned other than the need to return to Conservative policies which Blair not so secretly had always favoured. 

These days, we associate New Labour with four main things – PR “spin”, the Iraq war; a globalist encouragement of immigration; and huge budgetary increases for health and education. But there was a positive side which even an ex-adviser to Margaret Thatcher recognises in this critical review of “Broken Vows”.   

But – despite the claims in the Introduction - Bower’s book is NOT an attempt to judge a government – let alone dispassionately. As is abundantly clear in the devastating picture of Blair portrayed in the book’s opening chapter and Afterword, this is a hatchet job on a man whose greed, superficiality and delusions were already evident to most of us 

Those wanting a serious analysis of New Labour should better spend their time on -

New Labour – a critique Mark Bevir (2005) Not the easiest of reads – the author is a post-modernist academic if also a social democrat – but starts from the position that New Labour used slippery language and ignored its traditions. But excellent on options and traditions ignored...

The Verdict – did Labour Change Britain? Polly Toynbee and David Walker (2010) written by journalists sympathetic to Labour who supply a reasonably balanced assessment – if one rather light on references.